The usual disclaimer: I'm not saying these questions are bad or otherwise unfit for DF Talk discussion, just providing answers where I can.
2. Do you intend to add more role-playing elements to the process of creating an adventurer? I'm talking about something like the questions asked in ADOM but I'd love to hear any of the ideas you have and also possibly when you envisage being able to incorporate them (more what order of priority it would have amongst other plans, not an exact time date).
We've got these
dev items:# SCENARIOS ARC: Character generation is due for a major change. The current plan is to have an interactive history generator that takes your character from birth to a playable age, incorporating them into the fabric of the world. Pressing "Play Now!" would answer the questions automatically, perhaps with a strong tendency to place you in dire/interesting situations. Related to Core75, Core76, Req214, Req317, Bloat26 and Bloat143.
# Core75, ADVENTURER GENERATION AND SCENARIOS, (Future): The adventurer is quite a nebulous object at this point. There are a variety of angles that can be taken here, from weaving the adventurer fulling into their starting location's history, actually playing an existing creature in the world, creating starting scenarios that at least make sense of the adventurer's existence and/or mysterious arrival, etc.
And also a discussion from the List thread:
He also mentioned (I think in that recently posted interview) wanting to do something for adventurers, like finding ways to interweave your past with history. But it would be even cooler if, when you start a new adventurer, the history generator starts back up so that your adventurer has a "real" history instead of a retconned one. As it's generating your life, the game could identify potentially pivotal moments and let you make a decision, which would not only change your character's goals but also shape their personality. Kind of like LCS character generation, but more hardcore.
The issue with restarting the generator is that you might not want the world to advance by more than a decade every time you play (especially if your characters tend to die immediately), but it would be cool as an option, and it would give you the opportunity to have more impact -- however, most of the impact should be during regular play instead of through a Q&A process, I think, so maybe it's not much different from the retconning approach in retrospect. With retconnning, you'd still be able to make decisions -- they'd just only be able to seriously affect the other new characters that have been pulled up from your abstract population. That isn't all that bad, since the populations can have attached historical events, so it can be very thorough with respect to the existing history, and you could meet the real old historical figures, just not have an effect up to the level of, say, killing them or taking their important things. It could insert new events back into the old histories though. You'd just not want those to make subsequent decisions seem odd.
An exception to the lack of impact (either desired impact in the restart-generator setup or technically feasible impact in the retcon setup) might be the start scenario, as it could involve some of the main historical figures sacrificing you by dropping you into a cave or something, but that is essentially a restart-generator scenario that has run a very short period of time.
1. Will the speed of creatures be changed to more realistic levels so that for instance a dwarf would never be able to outrun a deer no matter how perfectly agile he is?
2. Will creatures be given separate walk/run speeds that they use at different times and for different reasons?
This also came up in the List thread:
Question for toady & friends. Are there any plans to give creatures more accurate stats? I'm talking about all creatures, above and below ground. For example, movement speed. Cheetahs are currently the same speed as cats. Wolves and such should really be able to outrun unskilled dwarves. Is any of the raw update dealing with this kind of thing, or is that for another day?
Toady One has mentioned a desire to separate movement speed from speed at other actions, though I beleive he also said it was not going to happen this release. My search fu is weak, so I can't get a betrer reference for you.
Was the very first part of this cycle breaking creatures down into 6 physical stats and 11 mental ones? Though I recall that he had some trouble regarding separating Agility and Movement Speed.
Yeah, that's right. I can't just change the speed variable because it also influences the number of attacks (and everything else). These are going to be teased apart at some point in the combat arc, when it really starts to matter (in the sense that the current situation is untenable for "version 1" combat). When that work begins I have no idea.
In terms of attribute effects, it currently uses agility and strength to determine the change in speed from the raw value. There have been some ideas floated for how to change agility into more variables to differentiate the dancers from the surgeons and crafters, but there's something aggravating down there that is similar to the question of breaking strength up by body part (which is a bit excessive/memory hoggish), so I'm not sure what's going to happen.